Spy: Vigilante Ninja 'Was Right in Osama's Neighborhood'

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Jun 15, 2010

Illustration by Joe McKendry; Logo Design by Ben Running

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Pakistani police arrested a California man on Monday, which was strange enough. Except it turns out this particular California man, Gary Brooks Faulkner, was armed with a 40-inch sword, a knife, a pistol, night-vision goggles, some hash, and, oh, some light Christian reading. All on the hunt for Osama bin Laden. So we called another man, who until recently was an American intelligence officer. Except this man still gets a fresh look at the latest reports from afar, and he says Faulkner might have been pretty damn close to Earth's Most Wanted. —Eds.

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I think it's amazing he was up there by himself. To get up into that area from the Pakistan side, you basically go up into Peshawar. The last time I was in Peshawar, we actually went with the Pakistani chief of the general staff, and he didn't want to go. We flew up in a gunship, and had guards everywhere. We have a consulate up there, and this was right after our consulate got attacked. You just don't — it's hostile Indian territory up there — you just don't go wandering around. Faulkner would have stuck out like crazy, too. You go there alone as an American not so much to kill bin Laden as to get yourself killed. This guy's risk appetite is off the charts. No government agency is going to send one of their people in on a death-wish hunt like that. We just kind of don't do the kamikaze thing anymore.

Perversely, there's always the chance that a freelancer like Faulkner, traveling light, unaccompanied, unaffiliated, unknown, might be walking by his village and see a bunch of guys with guns and pop his head in the door and say, Ha! I found you! We would have a better chance through intel of pinpointing his party, but as far as making human contact, I suspect this guy has a better chance, yeah.

The guy was looking in the right place, according to my most recent data point. Every once in a while there are reports that crop up — I saw one two weeks ago — that he was hiding in this little Iranian village. I doubt he is. But it's not as crazy as people think that he might be there. Buried in the 9/11 Report, there is a footnote that talks about how we actually picked up radio signals of the Iranian Quds Force, which is the super elite of the Revolutionary Guard — they're the people who do the training for Hezbollah, etc. — helped to spirit bin Laden out of Tora Bora. And long before 9/11, the Iranians kept close tabs on Osama bin Laden. It's unclear whether or not they were helping him, or coordinating anything, but they found him very interesting. They knew where he was, and they had developed something of a truce with Al Qaeda. So it's not a crazy idea that bin Laden would go to Iran, but I don't think he's there. So it's very likely that Faulkner was right in Osama's neighborhood.

Bin Laden basically doesn't see the light of day. I mean, he's not in a cave twenty-four hours a day, but he doesn't talk on the phone. After they figured out that we could trace their satellite phones — they actually do read Western newspapers, which is crazy, but they do — and so after they figured out we could read their sat comms, they basically just reverted back to the pony express. Guys on mules delivering hand-scrawled messages. From their perspective, they've got all the time in the world.

I'd prefer to catch him rather than kill him, but I don't have my hopes up that we're going to catch him. There's credible reports that he travels with folks whose job it is to shoot him before he gets captured, to deprive us the pleasure of taking him alive.